Self Build Commercial Management Course
Running the money side of your own build, from before the plot to the day your retention comes back.
This is the commercial side of building your own home. The money, the contract, the payments, the changes and the records. Not the design, not the planning, not how to lay a block. Most self-builds that go wrong do not go wrong because of the building. They go wrong commercially: a quote treated as a price, a contract nobody read, payments made on trust, a change agreed in the driveway and priced three months later when the work is already in the ground. Every one of those is preventable, and none of the prevention is difficult. It is mostly a matter of doing four things in the right order: know the number, agree it in writing, pay for what exists, and write down what happened.
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Where are you up to?
Before you read any of this, do one thing
This takes ten minutes and it is the most useful ten minutes in the whole course.
Open the Total Project Cost Checklist. Work down it and put your own figure against every line, guessing where you have to. Then look at the total.
For most people that number is somewhere between a quarter and a third higher than the figure they had been carrying in their head, because the figure in their head was the builder’s price and the checklist counts everything else: the professional fees, the statutory charges, the connections, the insurance, the finance, the kitchen.
If your total is bigger than the money you have, you have just found that out on a Tuesday evening rather than in month nine of a build. That is the entire point of this course, demonstrated on your own project, before you have read a word of theory.
Everything after this explains what to do about it.
The Aldertons
One family runs through this whole guide, so that every idea arrives attached to a real situation rather than a rule.
Tom and Priya Alderton are building a four-bedroom house of 185 square metres on Plot 2, Meadow Lane. It is a new build. They have one builder doing the whole job, with their architect administering the contract. They are funding it with savings and a self-build mortgage that releases money in stages, in arrears. They hold £520,000, and their stated worry when they started was, in their own words, "how do we not get ripped off".
They are invented. Their numbers are invented, and they are not a cost guide. What they are is a consistent example: every figure in this guide about the Aldertons appears again inside the templates, so when you open a tool the example in it is the one you have just been reading about.
Where the way you are running your build changes the answer, I say so in a short note. The Aldertons have one builder. If you are engaging trades yourself, or buying a timber frame kit, or having a contractor take it to weathertight and finishing it yourself, the principles are identical and the practicalities differ. Those notes are marked.
The six stages
You do not have to read it from the beginning, find the stage that describes where you are today and start there.
The whole course is about 55 minutes of reading. Take it a stage at a time, or download it as one document.
The two checkpoints
Everything in this course narrows to two moments. The week you sign, and the week you pay the first valuation. Each checkpoint is five questions, answered from your own documents rather than from memory.
The download
The whole course as one document, with all twelve templates linked. Free to download.
The tools the course teaches
The course references twelve of the service set's templates, and every one is free on its own page.
It does not price your build, and it does not cover design, planning, building regulations, programme or delay.
Beyond the course
If you want a stage taught rather than read - your own paperwork on the table, me walking you through it - Commercial Consultation is one session booked for exactly that. If you want the money side run for you instead, I run it month by month through Commercial Management while you build.